BBC’s Panorama was on Egypt lastnight. There was an interesting scene where Jane Corbin was interviewing a couple of middle class Egyptian women who spoke of how Facebook saved their country.

If you click on the link below, it will take you to the BBC Panorama webpage. Though it is interesing, if you don’t want to watch it all, just move the timeline cursor to about 19.30 and watch from this time.

Who knows about the future of social media? It is developing fast in the world of news and is constantly being used in different and new ways. Maybe, soon, these programmes will be in 3D, or we will start seeing holograms of people commenting live on TV news programmes through a new social media application… watch this space.

I am looking into the different media outlets that adopt social media and the ways that they do it. My last post briefly introduced how the Sports industry uses sites like Facebook and Twitter as important elements to spread news fast not only to those within it but to the fans and public too.

This post shall look at how more and more now charities are adopting social media to spread their news to the public, their sponsors and those who make donations. There seems to be a new industry now opening up for fellow journalists within the charity sector. As well as PR jobs, there are job titles available now like ‘Head of News,’ which I saw advertised recently on the Cancer Macmillian website.

“Social media has enabled ShelterBox to engage and interact with our supporters in a way charities have traditionally struggled with. By fostering and developing a wider conversation with our ‘audience’ through different social media channels, we’ve been able to raise global awareness of our mission. Our use of social media has empowered our supporters and engendered a sense of community on a global scale.”

“In terms of spreading news, nothing can rival the immediacy of social media. Our Response Teams tweet live from disaster zones as the situation unfolds around them providing a real-time snap shot of what life is like on the ground. Social media has revolutionised the way we communicate and the way we consume information.”

Today, the entire media industry has become dependent on social media as a newsgathering tool. If the entire system crashed, I don’t think many journalists would know what to do next. It has become key in the world of news.

It is not just the obvious multimedia outlets of Television, Radio and Online that utilise it. This article gives a different angle on how social media is a crucial instrument in the Sports industry. Fans no longer have to wait for the latest news on their favourite sports team but can have quick and easy access to updates through various sites.

In the traditional world the news organizations had to give out information, and people would consume it. But simply making information available is not enough for today’s public. Today’s audiences expect to be able to choose what they read, and most believe they should be able to contribute content and opinions, too. This shift is generally called the social media.

Basically social media use internet-and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. It has not only benefited journalists but has also helped give individuals a way to speak up to the world.

More and more people prefer reading newspapers online due to the online version being global, free and around forever. If most of the consumers are on line, it is better to reach them online. Traditional media is slowly becoming history. Journalists are now making a good use of social media to engage their audience.

From this point, in order to analyse this blog’s topic of the impact that social media has in journalism nowadays, each one of us has our own section to research.

Iqbal Hussein will be looking into the various forms of social media. I will be invesitgating into the different media outlets that use social media and it’s outputs. How journalism has adopted social media over the last decade is Laura Isherwood‘s area and Ruben Martinez will be exploring the legal and ethical concerns surrounding it.

As we all research into out own topic, we will add posts as we go, be it our own thoughts on it, a summary of what we have found, a conclusion or a useful link.

Finally, as we all complete our individual studies, we should all be able to draw conclusions on our main topic of the impact of social media and draw a general map of different types of news gathering techniques and outputs whilst taking into consideration the legal parameters.